"We could, of course, use any notation we want; do not laugh at notations; invent them, they are powerful. In fact, mathematics is, to a large extent, invention of better notations. The whole idea of a four-vector, in fact, is an improvement in notation so that the transformations can be remembered easily."
What he said about mathematics, I think it applies even more to programming.
[1] The Feynman Lecture on Physics, Volume 1, Chapter 17
At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." It was based on a
few things from the past like how smart you had to be in Roman times to multiply two
numbers together; only geniuses did it. We haven't gotten any smarter, we've just
changed our representation system. We think better generally by inventing better
representations; that's something that we as computer scientists recognize as one of
the main things that we try to do.
Comments
Richard Feynman wrote[1]:
"We could, of course, use any notation we want; do not laugh at notations; invent them, they are powerful. In fact, mathematics is, to a large extent, invention of better notations. The whole idea of a four-vector, in fact, is an improvement in notation so that the transformations can be remembered easily."
What he said about mathematics, I think it applies even more to programming.
[1] The Feynman Lecture on Physics, Volume 1, Chapter 17
According to this, multiplication wasn't so bad: http://turner.faculty.swau.edu/mathematics/materialslibrary/...
Actually real Romans did multiplication on an abacus. Reading from Roman numerals to/from an abacus is an incredibly natural operation.
In Europe the disappearance of abacuses was directly tied to the rise of Arabic notation.
Without a table? Just from memory? I think I'd prefer decimal.